Burcht Pranger, Dept. of Art, Religion and Cultural Sciences, University of Amsterdam
Quod infixum manet: Perseverance in Augustine and Heinrich von Kleist
In this paper I intend to wage an experiment by discussing the theme of the transformation of discourse as it manifests itself, contrariwise, in the guise immobility. My two protagonists, Augustine and Von Kleist share a common feature—and that is why I bring them together—in inserting, in their discourse, an element of fixity and immobility which is clearly at the source of the dynamics of restlessness so characteristic of their writings but whose elusive presence as yet awaits assessment.
As for Augustine, there are many layers in the way he has transformed his discourse during his long journey from sinner to bishop. I do not intend to deal with each and every of those transformations in this paper, but, by way of introduction, I summarize them briefly. First, we have the philosophical, Neoplatonic discourse which has continued to pervade Augustine’s thought throughout his career while slowly being filled up with a more biblical vocabulary. Next, there is his transformation from pagan to Christian as it materialised, discourse-wise, in the famous tolle lege of his conversion. Third, there is a transformation of discourse from the richness of philosophico-biblical language (De civitate dei, De trinitate, De doctrina Christiana) into the barrenness of polemical language with regard to the problem of predestination.
Now it is this last transformation of restless and dynamic discourse resulting into the immobility of predestination and its anthropological sequel, perseverance, on which I want to concentrate in this paper. Little would this problem concern me, if we were faced here with nothing more than a chronological development from young, philosophical Augustine, through the maturity of the bishop, to a grumpy old man. What is much more alarming is the fact that the presence of the immovability of divine authority (da quod iube, iube quod vis) has been present all along. If that is true, analysing the Confessions, for instance, becomes a much more complex undertaking, prevented as we are from reading it exclusively as the testimony of a quasi-modern (Petrarchian), restless soul. What we do have to account for, is the iron embrace in which both unrest and permanence hold each other. In that case, we are no longer free to take the mobility of conversion (including pre- and après-conversion) at face value, just as, in my view, a post-modern, Lyotard-like emphasis on uncertainty and undecidability does not suffice.
Without going to much into (historical) details, I want to state on which assumption I myself am acting—and that is the speculative conviction that Augustine has become entangled in a problem he himself appeared to be incapable of solving. That being so, the sustained presence of ‘perseverance’ in his thought and writings becomes all the more intriguing.
As for Von Kleist, I bring him in for the following reason. Puzzled by the fact that, after the tour de force of the Confessions, someone so conscious of the transformational aspects of discourse and life as Augustine, proved to be unable to find an adequate, literary expression for the fixity underlying his every thought and action, and by implication, any transformational aspect of his discourse, I turn to an author who has succeeded in achieving precisely that. Before giving the impression that in proceeding in this way, I claim any success, I want to point out that the net result of this experiment highlights, to a greater degree than before, the impossibility of grasping, in terms of discourse, the immobility (or is it flow?) of permanence and perseverance. Like Augustine, Von Kleist is no stranger to the dark side of life. Penetrating a bit more into the heart of darkness, that is, I think, as far as we can get.
1. The integrity of grace
Regardless of its shape predestination ‘breaks the air’. Unlike the caring wings of divine providence spreading into time and history, it brings home the gift of bliss and damnation, decreed and spoken, once and for all, through a timeless word. No wonder, then, that, throughout the ages, its unique status has lent it a touch of solitude and isolation. Whereas providence could always be found in the company of time and history, predestination was doomed to leave the stage once it had delivered its message. Inevitably, measures were taken to make it feel more at home. Originating in the complexities of Augustine’s phrasing of grace as the gift of God and of its being withhold as the well deserved fate of the massa peccati, predestination went on either to be toned down or to be radicalised even further. Not surprisingly, Church doctrine opted in favour of the first alternative in what was to become known as semi-pelagianism. By granting man his share in the process of salvation whilst maintaining the sovereignty of divine grace it took the sting out of the problem of uncontrollability. In either case, whether linked to the human will or taken out of the human realm altogether, the ‘homeliness’ of predestination was enhanced. For even in the radicalised version predestination gained in pervasiveness making up for what it had seemed to lose in distancing itself.
Occasionally, a rare individual took to the radical interpretation. In the Carolingian era the monk Gottschalk, for instance, came up with the doctrine of gemina praedestinatio (ad vitam et ad mortem). For all its inaccessibility and its being spoken eternally, predestination had been taken by Augustine to be about man’s destiny in time. How could it be otherwise since man was created in time? Gottschalk, however, transferred man’s destiny in its entirety to the supra-temporal (supralapsarian) knowledge of God. In his view this supra-temporal impulse bestowed on man was very well summed up in the words of Christ himself: ‘I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.’ Here we see the divine dove descend by ascending, taking under its (eternal) wings both the welcoming heart of the faithful and the hardening heart of Pharaoh: uncontrollability restored. Admittedly, Gottschalk’s being condemned, persecuted and exiled for his views on the issue of double predestination has produced fine poetry, as in the famous Ut quid iubes, pusiole. O cur iubes canere?: ‘Oh, why do you ask me to sing?’ Just as the people of Israel hung their harps on the willows because of their sorrowful state of captivity, so Gottschalk refuses to give in to the request to sing a carmen dulce. Yet his sung refusal lends voice to a life lived under the bittersweet auspices of a double predestination.1
The beauty of Gottschalk’s poetry notwithstanding, predestination was not destined to trigger the creative impulse. The fact that in Gottschalk’s case it did, can be explained by the concept of gemina praedestinatio which was to remain an exception to the rule. In a sense double predestination displays some analogy to the concept of fate in that it was precisely the paradox of fate (in tragedy) to be at once overwhelmingly present as the ‘gift’ of either fortune or providence and to represent the absence of any understanding of their workings or even any human say in its coming about other than its execution. Another great Christian poet, Boethius, is a point in case. In his Consolation of Philosophy Boethius resorts to poetry thereby transcending the constraints of philosophical prose including his own. Thus both men can be seen writing poetry in an attempt to cope with their captivity, Boethius from his prison in Padua, Gottschalk locked up in the monastic prison* on the island of Reichenau. Somehow double predestination can be seen as a harsher version of fortune and providence. Boethius succeeded in tracing back his cruel and undeserved fate to divine providence and justice admitting to his initial error of judgement in lamenting the injustice of his captivity. Gottschalk’s trust in God is more unconditional. For him there was not even an opportunity for initial error with regard to the rights or wrongs, or, for that matter, the visibility or invisibility, of the course of divine justice. From the beginning to the end mercy and damnation were both hidden in God’s eternal decree. Of course, the combination of eternity on the one hand and a beginning and an end on the other is nothing but a sheer paradox. Yet, as in tragedy, one could imagine the doom of the cruel gods or the bliss of grace, in their very absence, pervading the histories of Boethius and Gottschalk. In other words, life can be lived under the aegis of fate or, even, double predestination. Things become much more complex, however, when one tries to account for predestination as touching down on the human will, marking it, so to speak, as both the gift of destiny and the burden of responsibility. And even though the simultaneity of fate and responsibility seems to be precisely the stuff of fate and gemina praedestinatio, the doctrine of predestination as coined by Augustine speaks differently. The very fact that, in Augustine’s view, Adam before the fall was in the possession of the posse peccare-as the guarantee of free will- while needing the adiutorium sine quo non to prevent himself from succumbing to the temptation of sin- seems to blow a big hole in the integrity of grace.2 In terms of fate and double predestination it would look like man retrospectively being offered a way out of his pitiful state in such a way, however, that his prehistory would spoil the fullness of the later redemption by grace or, for that matter, rejection. The reason for this incongruity lies in the fact that the beginning (of the posse peccare) would not connect to the end (the non posse peccare), unless one introduces different sorts of grace, the one of minor stature at the beginning and the other of major stature at the end, the one guaranteeing the possibility of free will (i.e., the power not to sin), the other representing the overpowering presence of grace (the incapacity to sin). ‘Human nature has lost minor immortality—the posse non mori—through free will; it will receive major immortality—non posse mori—through grace, which it would have acquired by merit if it had not sinned, although even then any possibility of merit without grace would have been out of the question.’3 Quite understandably, Adolph von Harnack, Lutheran to the bone, has detected a Pelagian strand in the very core of Augustine’s doctrine. A grace that was supposed to be at once a mere condition guaranteeing the use of free will and effective (eine gratia die wirklich sein soll) seems to be self-contradictory. ‘For if a grace exists at all that produces only the posse non peccare, does not all grace have only this meaning? And if that is correct, are not the Pelagians right? For they are the ones who hold that grace is but a condition! Augustine’s doctrine of grace in man’s original state (the adiutorium) is Pelagian and it is inconsistent with his overall doctrine of grace. Here we have clear evidence that, from the viewpoint of predestination, no history can be construed.’4 How, Harnack wonders, is this grace with a beginning to be squared with the gratia irresistibilis that manifests itself most poignantly in the concept of perseverance? Or, to put the question in Augustine’s very own words: ‘How is it that Adam has sinned by not persevering; he, who has not received perseverance?’ It would indeed be difficult to explain Adam’s deflecting from grace at the beginning of his career when we see him saved by grace –thanks to the gift of perseverance- at the end of it.5 Do we have business with one and the same grace, or has it changed face in the process? If grace is as integral as the notions of perseverance and irresistibility suggest, has that golden bowl been damaged somewhere and some time? Harnack may have a point in saying that no history can be construed from a bowl with a crack since the transition from one state of grace to another cannot be accounted for. On the other hand, the succession of heterogeneous events is exactly the stuff history seems to be made on. Besides, suppose that grace would be as homogeneous as Harnack wished it to be—perseverance and gratia irresistibilis all the way-, the making of history would be an even more questionable affair. So much is clear, the question of the integrity of grace is tied up with the question of time—and eternity—as much as it is with plot (at least, if, for the time being, we take plot to be the narrative version of history). That means that, if grace is to be proclaimed as being overpowering and all pervasive, it cannot be excluded from the scene of initial deflection and sin. In one way or another, man’s past has to be accounted for in adequate terms. Is that possible at all? Is it possible to tell the story of the beginning without either smuggling in a freedom that is on bad terms with perseverance or resort to the resigned beauty of double predestination? And what about history? Is it possible to look back at ‘how we were’ from a position in which ‘we will never be again as we were’? Grace and redemption may be splendid as long as they are viewed as manifestations of eternity. But what effect do they have on and in time, not only at the end—which as a happy ending, or for that matter, as an utter failure, can be easily confused with eternity—but also at the beginning? Schleiermacher, for one, has shown to be aware of the mysteries of temporality when facing, in his second Rede, the human desire for immortality. For the individual to be immortal it has to give up itself and die (in favour of the Schleiermacherian Universum). But if, admittedly, people turn out to be primarily concerned with their private afterlives as an improved version of the present one (better bones, better minds), why, Schleiermacher asks, ‘don’t they worry so feverishly about what they have been as they do about what they will be? And how does progress help them when they are incapable of going backward?’6 Of course, the context in which Schleiermacher makes his point is quite different from Augustine’s. As for Schleiermacher, his criticism is levelled at the silly wish of the individual to extend his narrow, physical and mental life into the width of eternity. Yet ‘going backward’ is the problem for both Augustine and Schleiermacher. Can we ever state adequately ‘how we were’ without the help of grace abounding or, in Schleiermacherian terms, the incisive presence—established through the Anschauung—of the Universum?
2. Sooner or later
In the light of the integrity of Augustinian grace as outlined above, its Nachleben abounds with irony, as does indeed the Augustinian Nachleben as such. Within the sacramental unity of the visible Church—a notion as un-Augustinian as there ever was one—a proliferation of grace can be seen to develop, from gratia gratis data to gratia gratum faciens. In the process all kind of strings became attached to a gift that once upon a time had been characterised by unconditional generosity so as to cause it to be ill at ease with the original da quod iubes, iube quod vis. Whilst medieval grace thus proliferated into the various stages of grace as measured by as many merit points earned along the way, Harnack’s verdict as to the impossibility of construing history on the basis of Augustinian grace was ignored in favour of the story of man’s life as the account of his pilgrimage toward redemption. Meanwhile Augustinian notions of exile as expressed in the regio dissimilitudinis and the distentio animi conflated with a more general ‘Catholic’ view of the earthly existence as a sorrowful preparation for the celestial one. As a result, the integrity of grace and its anthropological counterpart, perseverance, as simultaneously comprising focus (attentio) and disintegration, became disconnected from life in the regio dissimilitudinis, turning into supplements to be administered to the faithful like pennies from heaven. Yet, although, in view of Harnack’s highlighting of the crack in the concept of grace, such distortions of the Augustinian view would seem to be inevitable, the resulting aporia makes a proper assessment of Augustine’s position all the more urgent.
Now it would be quite wrong to approach Augustine’s concept of predestination and perseverance from a static point of view as if there has been no development in his thinking about this issue. On the other hand, it can be argued that, regardless of its outlook, the very issue of stability, permanence and continence versus the flux of time, uncontrollability and sin has been an all pervasive presence throughout Augustine’s career. In that respect the Confessions is quite telling. Although written before the Pelagian controversy, the work is in fact about the gift of continence –and its elusiveness, that is, about that the unfathomable workings of an unfathomable God, appropriately expressed in the four times repeated da quod iubes, iube quod vis. It was this very phrase that gave so much offence to Pelagius and thus became the starting point of that hideous quarrel. But exactly what is the content of the da qod iubes, iube quod vis? In terms of the Confessions it is continence, so much is clear, the ‘putting on of Jesus of Christ’ (the text from Romans brought to Augustine’s attention by the tolle lege) which is not so much different from what later on was to be coined as perseverance (the gift of grace) based on the inscrutable judgements of God. That being so one might wonder why Augustine, in the Confessions, seems to makes so much of his reluctance and hesitancy to take the final step as if the implementation of the gift of grace and continence depended on it, as if, in fact, rejecting that gift was a real option (quod non). Of course, one explanation offers itself: it is sin and more generally, life in the regio dissimilutidinis, that introduces protraction, delay, postponement and unsustainability. ‘“How long. O Lord? How long, Lord, will you be angry to the uttermost? Do not be mindful of our old iniquities”. For I felt my past to have a grip on me. It uttered wretched cries: “How long, how long is it to be?” “Tomorrow, tomorrow.” “Why not now? Why not an end to my impure life in this very hour?”’ (8, 12. 28). Similar cries of despair with regard to disintegration of time into a succession of momentary delays are all over the narrative part of the Confessions culminating into its incantational repetition in book 8. ‘Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet’ (8, 7, 17). ‘I supposed that the reason for my postponing from day to day (differre de die in diem) the moment when I would despise worldly ambition and follow you was that I had not seen any certainty by which to direct my course. But the day had now come when I stood naked to myself, and my conscience complained against me: “Where is your tongue?”’ (8, 7, 18). In the selfsame book 8 this tantalizing process of deferral is contrasted with a number of examples of instant conversions by those who turned out to be more capable than Augustine of seizing the moment and saying the word. Among those champions of conversion the Ur-example of Antony stands out for its immediacy. ‘For I had heard how Antony happened to be present at the gospel reading and took it as an admonition addressed to himself when the words were read: “Go, sell all you have, give to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” By such an inspired utterance he was immediately ‘converted to you (Ps. 50:15)’ (8, 12, 29). This immediacy, in its turn, was preceded at the beginning of book 8 by sudden, Antony-like decisions of contemporaries of Augustine whose determination, highlighting his own hesitancy, put him to shame.
But how to measure hesitancy or, for that matter, instant conversion or decision making? How exactly do notions such as post and ante, long and short, durée and brevity function? Are they the markers of psychological development, of a protracted struggle of the mind as they, in fact, suggest they are when we take the text at face value? Admittedly, with the full weight of centuries of conversion psychology as triggered by the Confessions upon us, it is hard not to read this text as a straight account of inner turmoil being lifted by the moment of resolution and relief. Yet, in my view, this text can only be read in this ‘traditional’ way on the condition that one fail to account for the da quod iubes, iube quod vis, for the gift of grace, for the power of perseverance, or, to put it differently, for the way the Confessions are structured both with regard to their form and content. Central to both and, as a result, to the position inside the Confessions of the gift of grace and perseverance (the da quod iubes) as structuring principle is the vocabulary of temporality. So what in fact awaits accounting for is the status of post and ante, a long and a short time or moment, in short, the measurement of time. ‘Sero te amavi, sero te amavi/Late have I loved you, late have I loved you’, that is how Augustine ultimately has characterised his conversion story in terms of temporality. But what does this languid outcry evoke: the markers of psychological development, or the undivided and indivisible gift of beauty and grace?
Let us for a moment replace Augustine’s conversion story by a poem, say, Ambrose’s deus creator omnium or by a canticum, a psalm to be recited. We all know how, in book 9 of the Confessions, Augustine has traced the way we measure time. In the case of Ambrose’s hymn, length and brevity are being established by measuring the long syllables by the short ones- which is easier said than done since
when one syllable sounds after another, the short first, the long after it, how shall I keep my hold on the short … the long does not begin to sound unless the short has ceased to sound. But how to grasp sound? Having sounded the syllables ‘have flown away; they belong to the past? They do not now exist.’ ‘I can do this [measuring] only because they are past and gone. Therefore it is not the syllables which I am measuring, but something in my memory which stays fixed there (quod infixum manet). So it is in you, my mind, that I measure periods of time. Do not distract me; that is, do not allow yourself to be distracted by the hubbub of impressions being made upon you … that present consciousness is what I am measuring … ’ (11, 35, 36).
If we now link this concept of temporality whose fluctuations into prior and posterior are held together by quod infixum manet inside memory to the hesitancy and the general delay of the conversion story representing the so-called inner turmoil of the Augustinian soul, the implications are quite considerable. Since it is no longer possible to trace the sequence of inner movements and psychological development from a beginning to an end, or, for that matter, to measure their length and status, without taking into account the fixity of that which memory holds, Augustine’s report on his Werdegang from sinner to believer changes colours. Of course, the quod infixum manet inside memory is not per se identical to grace or perseverance. However, from a structural point of view, it is not alien to it either. The phrase ‘so it is in you, my mind, that I measure the periods of time’ is unique in the Confessions in that it is the only time that the confessio, which is uninterruptedly addressed to the source of grace, perseverance and fixity, God, is now made to the human mind: self-confession at the moment the mind touches upon the possibility of its own identity and integrity. In my view, we catch here a glimpse of what predestination could have been for Augustine had he been able to lend it the literary dynamics he had succeeded to grant, in his Confessions, to the moments of unfathomable fixity, eternity and time. As for the story of delay and hesitancy and the excruciating staging and phasing of the pangs of conversion, the markers of temporality such as non modo/‘not now, not yet,’ ‘how long, o Lord’ still stand. But just as the structure of temporality as based on and contained by memory has deprived the regio dissimilitudinis of its independent (Catholic) status without turning it into a realm of bliss or, in terms of mentality, into optimism tout court, so the story of delay and inner struggle is no longer supported by a psychological or, for that matter, a narrative infrastructure. How could it be otherwise? How could Augustine’s narrative method of addressing himself, from the beginning to the end, to his unfathomable God, ever support the linearity of psychological development and storytelling? And so we are back at Harnack’s remark that no (his)story can be construed on the basis of integral grace, gratia irresistibilis. ‘Late have I loved you, late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new … ’ ‘Sooner’ and ‘later,’ ‘prior’ and ‘posterior’ are here in the service of integral lateness, integral time. Read back into the conversion story that integrity eliminates neither the markers of temporality nor the markers of human moods, efforts and faculties. Instead embracing them all it keeps them in suspense and introduces the magic of a perseverance in the reverse; in other words, a perseverance that is not the result of human strive but, rather, its conditio sine qua non. The end of history and narrative? Yes, if denouement is all that counts. But does it?
3. Nicht versöhnt
Heinrich von Kleist’s longest short story Michael Kohlhaas is based on, and has the shape of, a sixteenth century chronicle. So, as for narrative structure, there is no doubt that we have a story before us with a proper beginning and end. Yet, right at the very beginning, a note of disturbance sounds: the story is about law, more precisely about the failure to uphold law. Thus an element of discomfort, undecidability and unfathomability is introduced whose unsettling presence does not fail to affect the narrative from the outset; a process we have become quite familiar with ever since Dickens’s Bleakhouse and Kafka’s Der Prozess. Not unlike Dickens’s ominous mentioning of the dragging on—on the brink of timelessness—of the Janice versus Janice case, Kleist’s very first line spells boundless trouble:
In the middle of the sixteenth century there was a horse trader living on the banks of the river Havel, the son of a school teacher, one of the most righteous and yet one of the most terrifying people of his time [Living in peace and quiet with his work, his wife and children] his memory would have been blessed had he not gone astray in one particular virtue. But his sense of justice made him into a robber and murderer.
The subtle transition from ‘gone astray in virtue’ to utter brutality in the next sentence, both connected and opposed by the ambiguous ‘but’ (aber), is reminiscent of Augustine’s markers of temporality. Here we are at once confronted with Von Kleist’s feverish, proleptic style that tends to absorb the quiet distinctions between events and qualifications into the overall theme of the story: injustice. Whilst from a literal viewpoint ‘but’ contrasts the ultimate loss of reputation to what it could have been had the horse trader stuck to his guns, the phrase in einer Tugend ausgeschweift simultaneously hints at a non-opposition, a permanence, a perseverance, indeed at a sublime way of sticking to virtue that transcends all markers of time and morality.
Before further going into details, let us turn to the story proper which, roughly, runs as follows.
One day when Kohlhaas, together with his servant and two of his horses, passes through Tronkenburg, the country estate of Tronka, the squire’s men stop him. They require him to show a permit and levy him. All this is done against the law which allows for free passage through the estate. Since Kohlhaas cannot show his permit,- quite unsurprisingly because he did not need one, his horses are taken in pledge and his servant taken into custody at the castle. During his stay the servant is beaten up and the horses are neglected. When justice is denied to Kohlhaas and his wife dies from the wounds inflicted upon her while trying to present a request to the count on behalf of her husband, events spin out of control. What initially had looked like a minor case of—arbitrary—injustice triggers a sequence of events all of whom result from Kohlhaas’ demand of justice and his taking vengeance after justice has been denied to him, and the squire’s refusal to give in. Kohlhaas turns into a self-styled revolutionary, setting his own laws, burning down Tronkenburg, and successfully calling people from all over Saxony to arms. Like another Thomas Münzer he becomes the leader of a people’s army that practises a scorched-earth policy. Things turn so nasty that the Kohlhaas army makes camp before the gates of the Saxon capital of Dresden. At that point Martin Luther intervenes by sending a letter in which he condemns Kohlhaas’ outrageous behaviour. Kohlhaas, for his part, does not let go; he manages to sneak in into Luther’s study and confronts the great man who is somewhat taken aback, with his case. A heated conversation between the two men follows in which Luther fails to convince Kohlhaas of the fact that incidental injustice is subordinated to the rule of divinely ordered authorities. In vain Luther also appeals to the Christian notion of forgiveness. Yet he shows himself willing to get in touch with the prince elector of Saxony and to arrange safe conduct for Kohlhaas in order to enable him to travel to Dresden and resume his ‘legal’ quest for justice. The long and short of the rest of the story only concerns us here insofar, regardless of attempts by the elector of Brandenburg to have justice follow its course after the promise of safe conduct has been broken by the elector of Saxony, Kohlhaas does not deflect from his insistence on justice being done in his particular case (the permit, the horses and the servant). When, ultimately, justice is being done to him but Kohlhaas himself is sentenced to death for his trespassing the law with his violent behaviour, he remains unbroken and unrepentant. Neither does he, in his final moments in prison, accept the holy communion sent to him by Luther through a messenger. That forgiveness is not an option becomes crystal clear when, in a final act of defiance, Kohlhaas swallows the note which could have saved his opponent, the elector of Saxony, from disaster causing his nemesis to drop dead on the spot.
There is no lack of perseverance in Michael Kohlhaas, so much is sure. Countless stories may be told about people who don’t give up, but here we are faced with more than ‘not giving up’ and more than sheer stubbornness, and, certainly with something completely different from the perseverance of the tragic hero blinded by ate or love as we know him from Orestes till Balzac’s père Goriot and onward. Somehow we realise to be on quite different territory here although it is not so easy to articulate exactly what makes Von Kleist’s view of perseverance so unique. In order to get some grip on it let us remember the unfathomability of Augustine’s God which made his movements of delay and hesitancy almost ghostlike depriving them as it did from sustainability in time and narration. Once reduced to memory (the link to divine presence) measurement of progress and delay became a more-dimensional matter and much less measurable than the moment of conversion would seem to suggest. As for Von Kleist, measurement is an issue of the utmost importance, and, at the same time, as enigmatic as Augustine’s ‘sooner’ and ‘later’. Perhaps some light can be shed on this problem if we look at the story from the viewpoint of proportion (as a subdivision of measurement). Without doubt, then, the general impression on the reader will be that Kohlhaas’ behaviour is out of proportion. If anything, this story looks like being governed by the overreaction of its main protagonist. Yet characterising Kleist’s novella in this way would miss the point although, admittedly, realising that immediately raises the question whether there is a point at all.
For the sake of brevity let us focus on the meeting between Kohlhaas and Luther. At first sight the argument between the two men is concerned with the seize of the conflict. For Luther, who at first mistakenly thought that Kohlhaas’ case was so private that the authorities did not know about it, it is still not grand enough to justify the violation of the social order and disobedience vis-à-vis the secular authorities. That Luther’s own theological stance should allow for quite a different view of the matter is a different question. Ironically, one of Luther’s own basic tenets, the simul iustus ac peccator has a Kohlhaasian/Kleistian ring to it (compare the opening sentence: ‘one of the most righteous and yet one of the most terrifying people of his time’), but is no part of Von Kleist’s story. Luther’s part is restricted to representing social order and the god-given power of the authorities. This is not so much a missed opportunity on the part of Von Kleist as, rather, due to the primarily political nature of Luther’s reputation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However that may be, Kohlhaas’ focus on the force of law is somehow reminiscent of the way efforts to express religious problems in legal terms have dealt with the issue of proportion. When Anselm of Canterbury, in his Cur deus homo, discusses the nature of sin, he and his partner in the dialogue, Boso, look into its scope. Suppose one has transgressed against God in one respect, a sin of modest proportion, sicuti est unus aspectus contra voluntatem dei. Is it not reasonable to assume in that particular case that a single act of compunction would suffice and give satisfaction? No, Anselm replies, if you argue along those lines, ‘you have not yet considered the weight of sin/nondum considerasti, quanti ponderis peccatum.’ The legal requirement of aut satisfactio aut poena means that the minutest offence against God violates the entire, divine order and requires full satisfaction. In a similar manner the withholding of justice in a particular case of modest proportion turns Kohlhaas into an outcast, to a life outside the law as a consequence of which the affair takes on universal dimensions :
‘The war I conduct with the help of the society of the people is a crime were it not the case that I, as you have assured me, have been expelled from society. ‘Expelled!’, Luther cried, looking at him. ‘Have you gone mad? Who would have expelled you from the society in which you are living? How can it be that someone, whoever it may be, as long as states exist, would be expelled from it? ‘Expelled’, Kohlhaas replied, pressing his hand, ‘that is what I call him who is deprived of the protection of the law! For I needed that protection for the well-being of my peaceful business. Yes, because of that protection I fled, taking my possessions with me, into this community [of lawless people]. And whosoever denies me that protection, sends me away to the wild men of the desert.’
For Luther all this comes down to sheer overreaction. But, ironically, the fact of the matter is that Kohlhaas gets under Luther’s skin by sticking to the facts and asking no more than a proportionate satisfaction for the ills inflicted on him: bringing back the horses to their original state/Wiederherstellung der Pferde in den vorigen Stand and damages. Luther is stupéfait. ‘Damages’, he cries. ‘Does Kohlhaas mean to claim back the large sums he has borrowed and the property he has pawned in order to fund his violent campaign?,’ he asks sarcastically. ‘No’, Kohlhaas wryly replies, ‘I don’t claim back my house and farm, nor the costs I have made for the funeral of my wife.’ There is something tragicomic to this passage. Luther does not seem to get the point. But which point exactly? Here he faces someone who appears to have extended a particular case of injustice into a universal problem materialised in the setting up of a campaign of brute violence. In that respect Kohlhaas is indeed ausgeschweift into despicable, social behaviour which Luther justifiably feels his duty to condemn. Yet at the same time Kohlhaas cannot univocally be said to have ausgeschweift into vice—Von Kleist’s condensation is in place here: ausgeschweift in einer Tugend. Throughout his extended quest for justice Kohlhaas’ focus has not changed for one single moment: Wiederherstellung der Pferde. That legally justified demand is in a sense not affected by the fact that he has meanwhile turned into a robber and a murderer since that extension into the status of outcast had been forced upon him as a result of the withholding of justice.
This minutely sticking to the facts creates a paradox in the novella which boils down to the impossibility of squaring this display of perseverance with Kohlhaas so-called ‘overreaction.’ So much is clear that, as in all other stories by Von Kleist, so here the narrative is governed by a ‘fact’ that is overwhelmingly present and as elusive and unfathomable as Augustine’s God. Narratively speaking, we can at least somehow deduct how Von Kleist proceeds, as, for instance, in the opening statement ‘one of the most righteous and yet one of the most terrifying men of his time’ by conflating the viewpoint of the author with the enigma created by his pen while writing a chronicle, of a type of behaviour—perseverance—that not so much transcends the succession of time and narration as, rather, pervades them and turns them to into something exceedingly light and mysterious and yet represents the facts and nothing but the facts. At the same time, it is those very facts, however minute and mysterious, that do not allow for any evasion, delay, excuse, of extension regardless of the events and actions that very much look just like that.
All those Kleistian elements converge in the moment Luther changes his tone of chagrin and starts playing the religious card by appealing to the weakest spot in Kohlhaas’ edifice of a sustained demand for justice: the possibility of forgiving his opponent:
‘But, all things considered, would you not have followed a better course if you had forgiven the squire for the sake of your Redeemer, taken the horses by hand, wearied and scrawny though they were, left that place and driven them to your stable in Kohlhaasenbrück in order to fatten them up?’ Kohlhaas replied: ‘Maybe’, while walking to the window, ‘maybe, may be not (kann sein, auch nicht!). Had I known that I would have had to bring them back on their feet with the blood of my wife, maybe I would have done what you say, my Lord, and not denied the horses a heap/shovel of oat. Yet, since I have paid so dearly for them, I think things should follow their course. Let the sentence to which I am entitled speak and let the squire fatten the horses for me.’
This appeal to justice is at the same time an appeal to the human side of Kohlhaas, to the soft spot in this ‘violent’ man. And, on the surface level, Kohlhaas seems to have his moment of doubt: ‘maybe, maybe not.’ Yet it would be quite un-Kleistian to end up with keeping the possibility alive that there are two sides to the matter. To make things even more complex, it would be even more un-Kleistian to deprive the ‘maybe, maybe not’ of its authentic meaning as if the taking into consideration of two alternatives would be for the sake of appearances only. Things are far more drastic than that. In terms of logic, what we have here is the fact that for Kohlhaas the law of the excluded middle does not apply. As a result the ‘maybe, maybe’ is not the summing up of possibility a or b. It rather reminds one of the ‘alas, alas’ of tragedy, the difference with tragedy being that the ‘alas’ is about the sustainability of justice against reality rather than the acceptance of its downfall. The split second Kohlhaas seems to waver thinking of the suffering inflicted on him by the death of his wife, derives, not from a neutral and open availability of choosing between alternatives, but, rather, straight from the law itself. In that respect it is a final display of superiority in the face of Luther—superiority not as a way of making oneself bigger, but as a way of shrinking and returning to the real seize of the real problem without loosing the human touch.
And so we are back with the issue of seize, proportion and measurement. As for seize, the ‘maybe, maybe not’ represents the unfathomability of the law, the fact, and of perseverance. That is what the Kleistian—and Augustinian—sense of proportion is about. That being said, the implications of that stance in terms of narration and psychology are far reaching. In Luther’s desperate effort to convince Kohlhaas by appealing to his sense of reality, his sense of the human and the religious, the unrelenting verticality of Von Kleist’s perseverance comes to the fore. Its radical nature lies in the fact that it operates like a razor cutting off any effort to approach this story from the outside, that is, outside its spine: the law, incarnated in the persevering person of Kohlhaas. There is just no point—and that is exactly what is being highlighted by Luther’s failed intervention—in trying to appeal, externally, to human reason, religion, motives, sense of reality or the lack of it. But even putting things this way still sounds too external. Kohlhaas’ actions not being a matter of mood or inclination and, least of all, of stubbornness and overreaction, not only eliminates a psychological or motivational explanation. Poetically, it also prevents the opening line of the novella ‘one of the most righteous and yet one of the most terrifying men of his time’ to extend and, as a consequence, the course of the story to overflow into events that demand an assessment in terms of succession, causality and linear time. In short, there being no moment this integral line does not sound, the reader is not allowed to break through the image of the single person of Kohlhaas as presented in the beginning. That is what perseverance is about and that is why Kohlhaas dies unrepentantly, nicht versöhnt. No peripeteia, conversion, or, for that matter, transformation of discourse here of any kind but the sustainability of a personal union, forever indivisible—quod infixum manet—between law and man.
Notes
1 Cf. Dronke, P., The Medieval Lyric (London: Hutchinson, 1968), 35: ‘Such a refusal is of course a topos, an old-established literary mannerism. It can never be wholly serious, because it belies itself: in the moment of denying his song, the poet sings.’
2 De correptione et gratia, caps. XI, 31-XII, 36, esp. cap. XII, 33-34. PL 44: 935-938.
3 Enchiridion. 106 as quoted by von Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, dritter Band II (Tübingen 1932), 216.
4 Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, II, 216.
5 For a recent assessment of this problem, see James Wetzel, ‘Predestination, Pelagianism, and Foreknowledge’, in Stump, E. and Kretzmann, N., eds., The Cambridge Companion to Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 49-59.
6 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Über die Religion, Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern, 98 (132 in the Urtext of 1799).